Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

One set of Otter trimming.

Two caracos of Spanish Lamb skin

8 ¾ yards of Chinchilla trimming.

27 yards of Sable tail trimming.

One front and a piece of Black Fox.

Four strips, a wrist band, two pockets, two sleeves and one trimming of Black Fox.

Two Swansdown skins, in pieces.

Fourteen Silver Fox skins.

Six half skins of Silver Fox.

Twenty Silver Fox tails.

One Otter collar.

Three tails of Canadian fur.

Two Marabout collars.

Some odd pieces of Chinchilla.

Four large carpets of black Bear skin.

Two small carpets of black Bear skin.

One brown Bear, with head.

One stuffed Bear.

One white Fox rug.

One caraco, one petticoat, and one waistcoat of chestnut coloured plush, trimmed with Otter.

19 ¾ yards of Otter trimming.

Two Pheasants’ skins

Three white Sheepskin stools.

One Sable dress trimming.

Three Sable skins.

Two squares of Chinchilla.

One Weasel tippet and two cuffs to match

Two pieces Swansdown.

Two Pheasant wings.

One stuffed Fox.

One pair of Otter gloves.

3 ½ yards of Skunk trimming.

Two court mantles bordered with Ermine.

I knew they’d published this list to shame her; but as many furs as were found, I knew well there’d been many more.

As often as not, under one of those ermine court mantles, Eugénie wore only a flannel wrapper, brought with her from Spain. It made the Emperor quite cross when he would look over and see a bit of it showing. I sometimes wanted to explain to the Emperor that he had married a horsewoman, but if he didn’t know it, it wasn’t for me to tell him. He’d admired her horsewomanly ways, having fallen in love with her on a hunting party at the Château Compiègne, meant to be six days that became eleven. At the end of it, he gave her the horse she rode in the hunt and an emerald pin shaped as a cloverleaf and covered in small diamonds in memory of a moment when she’d paused to admire a clover after the rain. He had it made in Paris while the hunt went on, and it arrived in time to be his token to her.

For all any of us know, he had the hunt extended so as to give this to her before she left, all of them waiting while the jeweler did his work and the Emperor his.

She lives now outside London, having escaped the mobs that screamed for her death. A brave few of her loyal subjects had rushed her from the palace in the first moments after the Emperor’s capture and the fall of the Empire. Like Louis-Philippe before her, she was rushed from the palace to London in a disguise, on the yacht of a British dentist.

I wondered how it felt to her, if she’d read the list of her furs, if she missed any of it at all, or if she was content to wear as much flannel as she liked now over there in England, the Emperor and the Prince dead.

I had a pang on reading the list, of missing my life there. I thought of the Tuileries and how the enormous buildings of the palace looked to me sometimes like the cars of enormous trains. I missed walking toward them in the night and knowing there was a small room for me within, where I could close the door and vanish, no one knowing who I was or where. In those days, the Emperor and Empress were both everything in my life and nothing to me, for I never saw them. I wasn’t among the servants who were close to her physically, not at first, though through my work I had to know, constantly, the intimate details of her life — if she had gained or lost weight, if she was with menses, angry or sad or in good humor. Each day had a schedule to it, determined by her events, when she would need this or that dress or gown or fur, and when she would no longer need them. It was not constant drudgery, but instead there were short periods of intense work and then long stretches with nothing to do. Nothing of my life mattered to them except that I be present according to my schedule, which I received weekly, with some changes daily, the times I was to climb inside the dumbwaiter and get the dress on. The hours were very irregular, as the parties could go late into the night or early morning, though usually her lady’s maids would leave the night’s last dress in the dumbwaiter, and we were to rise and send up the new one before the Empress woke. We knew, for example, when she was wearing the flannel underneath, as there would be no requests, nothing for us to do when the schedule clearly said something like Ambassadeur du Brésil.

I felt she let her flannel show to punish His Majesty for how he met for hours on matters of state with his “secretaries” every night, which is to say, his whores, his wives of other politicians and royals, their daughters, women who often imagined they could be his next Eugénie. As this was conducted below, his first Eugénie wandered the upper galleries and halls of the palace alone, with little or no hope of seeing him, visiting her courtiers in their apartments and playing with their children, always staying too late. No one could send her out; she was the Empress, and she was very lonely without her Emperor. And yet because it would be dangerous for her to have a lover, in case she was to bear a false heir, her movements were carefully guarded by secret police.

None of the young women who wanted her position knew what her position was.

§

As my role had no precedent, I was given a room of my own, a luxury, up in the eaves of the palace. I had a window that looked out onto the courtyard, a bed, a trunk with my name on it, and even a lamp for reading at night. A scarlet-eyed pigeon with bronze feathers was my single regular living visitor there. I was fed regularly and well, and passed my time mostly in the company of the other household servants. All of this suited me.

I remembered the stuffed fox on that list. Also the bear. I remembered the twenty silver fox tails. I liked to set a silver fox head, the mouth open around the head of the otter on the muff, and leave it lying out to make the other grisettes laugh. The stuffed otter I kept up in my room with me for company. In the dark, by lamplight, the glass beads for his eyes seemed always to be almost alive.

I’d found him in a corner of the fur closet, covered in three marabout boas. I quickly propped the boas on something else and then pushed him back behind several cloaks so he couldn’t be seen. A few nights later, as the courtyard blazed with the lights of a ball and the staff drank bad sour wine near the pantry stairs, I went down quickly to the basement fur closet and brought him to my room. I knew I could be arrested for theft, but there was none who missed him. He was tribute and sent, I imagined, from Quebec.

He had been made so he stood upright, as if he’d seen something. There were faint black silk stitches on his wrist, repairing the tear in the fur from the trap. In the dark, he looked whole and alive.

If he could have spoken, I would have known then, without any doubt, that I was lost in a fairy tale, but he never spoke. The single speaking animal in the palace was a parrot, a present to the Empress who’d sent it home with a maid, where it learned to swear and curse like the maid’s lovers. Sometimes I could hear it shouting, Tais-toi! Tais-toi! The creature had become much beloved by the Empress after that but was thought to be too obscene to be allowed anywhere near the apartments, and instead the bird was kept in the basement with us.

In days as carefully measured as Her Majesty’s gowns, I grew to be at peace with my lot in life somehow. I didn’t imagine that I would stay there forever, nor did I see any opportunity to leave. I was hidden deep inside the enormous machinery of the institution that was dressing the Empress for her public and private appearances, and what I thought, what I looked like, and who I was were of no importance to anyone as long as I accomplished my singular tasks. I had found a very strange and beautiful kind of shelter, and there was work I could accomplish easily. Here, no one knew me as anything other than une muette of indistinct origin. I was sure I was content to spend my life inside the warm circle of light my lamp made, whether it lit my room or my passage to the vast cloakroom of the Empress.